Bukowski's bluebird

"there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you."

~ Charles Bukowski, Bluebird

Turns out, there has been, after all, a blue bird sitting idle and unnoticed in my photo archives. I know it's not a bluebird. I know it's a stellar jay, the darker and shabbier cousin of the pretty blue jay. I know it belongs to a green, green land and scented, mossy boughs. I also know, if it flies here (ah, the utter foolhardiness of it!!) and cages itself, it'll forget to sing.
But does any of that matter now? Perhaps not anymore.

A gift and some memories

When I opened my blog yesterday afternoon, I hardly had any inkling of the beautiful surprise that awaited me. As I scrolled down my reading list, there it was, this wonderful, wonderful gift! My ever thoughtful and kind blogger friend, Pondside, just knew what I wanted at the moment. Despite being connected through the virtual yet sometimes much more comforting and real than the actual world, she has often come to my rescue with the most beautiful and encouraging words. And now, even when we no more share our most common bond, the wild and wonderful Pacific Northwest, she can sense what all I am pining for from the other end of the globe. Something which some of my old and most dependable friends just cannot, may be because they haven't been in my shoes or simply because in a time of an ever-growing and urbanizing India, no one has time for something as trivial as my rhododendron nostalgia. But in just a few heart-tugging and compassionate paragraphs, she opened up that rickety and always waiting-to-be-knocked door to the most fondest of my memoirs - Seattle.

Rhododendrons mean so much more to me than just flowers. When I had first seen them, new and nervous in a foreign land, they had seemed very, very exotic. There's a subtle pride and hardiness about them that I at once connected to. Gradually, they grew into this tiny part in me that associates them with the beginning of everything good in my life. And of course, there could not be a more mood lifting bloom, particularly when the day is overcast with a soft but steady drizzle. 
So just when I was wondering how by the end of June the rhododendrons usually paint the whole city red, pink and purple, and just when that corner of my heart was chocked with longing, Pondside's lovely mosaic rescued me.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for the marvelous journey down nostalgia lane. 

Some rhododendrons, from last year's bloom...

Pine

"Dark pine, I dream for me you wait."

~ Robert William Service, Dark Pine

A month had limped past, riddled with old fears, some long known regrets and new hopes. The most confusing concoction of emotions. And yet... She could still smell the pines in her sleep. That moist, earthy smell with a teasing tinge of longing. Laced like strings of raw emeralds, they dazzled on the rugged neck of the mountains. That gouging, blinding green; the colour of her dreams. Those towering torchbearers that once paved her path and danced to her moods. The feathered, faithful, forever evergreens!
Their brooding darkness called out to her, in wails and bawls. That which was foreign and lost felt hers, in a strange, protective way. That which was left far, far behind felt more alive than the current, ticking second. One of the many ironies of life. And the foreignness lingers on.  

Sea

"The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude."

~ Kate Chopin, The Awakening

I have grown up by the sea, the Bay of Bengal to be precise. Over the years, I have seen its many moods and musings, albeit in flashes. As a child the beach would be my vast playground, never-ending and always welcoming, dotted with a treasure trove of white and brown shells. As I grew up, the sea ceased to be a playmate and unmasked its willful, mature face. A little daunted and defeated at first, I gradually learnt to unearth that characteristic loneliness that the sea alone brings with it. It's a different feel altogether, churning marvel and mystery, scratching sealed old wounds open yet pacifying your most loathsome fears - all at the same time.
Always a biased admirer of the mountains, over time, the sea somehow grew on me. On sultry summer evenings, I would secretly wish to be left alone by my garrulous cousins on a beach outing, so that I could bottle its hum and roar and bring back its salty seductiveness with me. Today I long for such a visit.

Why am I talking of the sea today? Because despite the fortnight's vacation in my home state, I could not visit Puri, the famous tourist magnet of eastern India where the devotees of Lord Jagannath throng the brackish shores to end their pilgrimage. In a ritual-like regularity, every summer I would visit my grandparents even if it was just for a day. Thus I turned to list the things that I missed for the third consecutive summer and while my aunt's spicy prawn curry topped the chart, the beach began to haunt me like never before. Like a gush of warm blood, the memories of innumerable summer vacations flooded my thoughts. And now, amid all the crazy running around for the new home, I long for its reassuring lull; to sit near the waves and immerse myself into their monotonous drone; to bury my rues and regrets into its dark, greedy expanse; and above all, to reach out to that bittersweet loneliness.

How I long for all these and much more, in some corner of my tired heart.

Christmas lights

"Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful."
~ Norman Vincent Peale

Christmas lights round the corner
fluttering and flickering
old Redmond Town Square ablaze
the air swells with chill and joy
the old heart smells of love and longing
of long lost poems and drowsy doodles
to and fro, back and forth
it goes
stringing memory to memory
adding year after year
in a neat, nostalgic pattern
fluttering and flickering
just like these lights.

Seattle loves them who love Seattle

Our caravan has moved back to Seattle, the dot from where it had rumbled on three years before. The nomads have finally cruised a full circle, wheeling the entire country from coast to coast. Although I am not a believer in serendipity, this does feel like one. Who would have thought that chance alone would throw us on the beaten ruts once again?! After all, I haven't forgotten the fuss and melodrama I had made when we had to leave Seattle abruptly. Just when it was beginning to feel like home. Just when the nature junkie had begun singing odes to her pagan god. Just when ...

I still remember the faint piney tickle of the air when I had first arrived at the Sea-Tac airport in a damp June afternoon, cold and alone. A jumble of myriad emotions somersaulted inside me - the excitement of seeing Sam after a month; the daunting foreignness of every single moment; the nervousness of getting into an airport express train, for I had no idea what those eerily fast moving things were until then; the fidgeting worry whether I'll get my check-in bags (a co-passenger had already scared me saying her's was lost and wasn't found for months); and above all the giddy joy of having made it, all by myself. Strangely, the nine-hour flight from Amsterdam, after a layover of seven gnawing hours had not killed me. Haldiram's salted almonds and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies had kept me nourished and warm. Also, I had slept through most of the first flight from Delhi and hence felt quite rejuvenated.

So there I was, received by an almost unrecognizable husband (with a bush instead of a head!) at the baggage area, with a beaming face and a bunch of bright chrysanthemums. I remember they were dyed - green, blue, orange - and I had thought, "Wow, you could get these in green too!" Oh, and yes, my bags arrived safely too.

After three years of feverish longing and wandering in the dusty bylanes of nostalgia, we are here again. It is the same idyll, blanketed with fragrant evergreen woods and sapphire blue lakes. And what's more, it's almost spring! A quick visit to the famous Pike Place market last weekend saw a beautiful display of dewy tulips, possibly the first batch of the season to make their way into the market. After being buried for months in the brutal blizzards of the east, nothing could be more comforting than the sight of these charming flowers and the syrupy warmth of a gingerbread latte.

Well, numbing these small joys is the nagging confusion of apartment hunting coming up this weekend. Wars have to be waged over Sam's obsession with endless square footage and my balcony mania. So stay tuned for more stories from the Emerald city.

In Ashima's shoes

"For being a foreigner Ashima is beginning to realise, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy - a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts."

~ Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

Seven winters back when I had first read The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri's heartrending tale, it had stirred and brewed a little storm inside me. Since then I have gone back to it, in chunks and bits, like a fate-worn lover who has to return to the memories, living and losing at the same time. The love affair continues, only this time I am one of them from the pages. Ashima - a demure Bengali woman born in Calcutta, brought up amidst a fierce sense of culture and draped in unpretentious tangail sarees. She marries Ashoke, an engineering student at MIT and accompanies him for a new life to America - "the land of opportunities".

Ashima's life in the States is shaped out of many realities - the regular calls to Fulton fish market in the hope of a lucky catch of rohu or ilish, the much dreaded driving lessons when she would cringe her face and push the accelerator uneasily which would result in a beeline of traffic honking impatiently behind her, the mounting vexation during the customer care calls when she has to spell every single alphabet of 'Ganguli' unfailingly and with examples. Prior to my life as a foreigner, this futile yet continuous search of one's identity and the reluctant unraveling of oneself to blend in, both physically and mentally, had not been this huge a part of me. Now I, too, am ashima - one who does not have boundaries - for one simply cannot afford any in the desperate confusion of the old and the new.

My solidarity with Ashima transgresses the boundaries of age and experience. A surge of tender pity grips me when anxious and alone in the final trimester of pregnancy she craves for jhaal muri (an East Indian snack of puffed rice and spices) and quite helplessly tosses chopped onions into a bowl of Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts. There was not much choice for an Indian's culinary comforts in the America of the 70s. Ashima's most intimidating task, more so because she wears her Indianness with aplomb, is to understand and accept the American ways of her children who are themselves trapped in a huge chasm of cultural mores. How much could one fight one's way out of the linguistic and cultural barriers back then?

Even after a good thirty years nothing much has changed. Foodwise, yes, a lot has. With the mushrooming of Indian grocery stores and restaurants in almost every corner of the States, pleasing one's taste buds isn't a questionable dream anymore. Also, what was once the struggle for existence has undergone a vast change over the last twenty years resulting in an unbecoming vanity fair. But the old haunting feeling of rootlessness sits still in the same dusty corner of the heart. Festivals come and go, seasons spring and fall, but the ache remains. I have been walking in Ashima's shoes for the past three years, across six states and on a multitude of roads. With each step the bite has become worse, fanning the sore of longing till the wound feels like a second skin. And thus another day breaks, impregnated with a perpetual unknown wait...

The gupchup diaries

Gupchup, puchka, golgappa, paanipuri... Call it by any of these names, the taste remains the same - irresistible. Gupchup, as we Oriyas call it, has very much been a part of my growing up and from the time I could understand the ways of my taste buds, it has remained a steady favourite. It's time I chronicled its meaning and memories during the various phases of my life so far.

1. Summers at Puri, which happens to be my maternal grandparents' home, were the best times of my childhood. Being the only grandchild/niece then, I was quite pampered and often had my own ways. Every evening Ma and my mausis would take me to the beach where I had the time of my life romping in the sand, collecting sea shells. We wouldn't leave before having our share of soggy gupchup and jhaal muri from the beach vendors. None of the brackish winds or the prickling sands dared kill that fun.

2. Probably it was the distractions of teenage or mostly my hatred for the branch of Sciences, but it wouldn't be a lie if I said nothing interested me in those days. After school hours, we would go for afternoon tuitions which would go on for two agonising hours. The only comfort that would keep me sane in these otherwise horrid afternoons were the gupchup sessions that were held regularly after the tuitions. How we friends would circle the vendor and wait patiently for our turns when he would toss the savoury delight into our leaf bowls!

3. I left the secured walls of home for my graduation in Bhubaneswar. In the initial days I found it rather difficult to adjust to the novelties of an independent student life. The only comforting, familiar feel was that of the rows of gupchup stalls right in front of our campus premises. Like every hostel, ours too had one common problem - unpalatable mess food. So the evenings, after a day of longish lectures, meant regular calls to the attractively decorated blue stalls.

4. After graduation I moved to Hyderabad, the mecca for biryani and kabab lovers. Not being a keen non-vegetarian, I would miss the simpler fares that my home state offered. No matter what, my cravings were such that I would go for the relatively bland paani puris and wouldn't notice the vendor's mean stare when asked, "Bhaiya, thoda extra pyaaz dena" (some more chopped onions please).

We have reached the rather sad end of my gupchup diaries. Life in the States can mean so many things to an Indian, culturally and emotionally. Mine is a long list of stubborn yearnings, right out of a Jhumpa Lahiri story. I have tried the tricky but extremely simple recipe at home from the ready-made gupchup pockets that are available in the Indian grocery stores. It turns out fine by home standards, but that nostalgic aroma of belongingness is always missing. Now all hopes are pinned on that once-a-year vacation, the most beautiful dream of every immigrant. Home beckons...

An eternal love

It all started in the summer of 1998. My parents took me to Shimla, the old British summer capital, as a treat that befitted a fifteen year old who had just gone through the harrowing experience of the Board exams. I never had the foggiest idea that this journey would cling on to me as one of the most prized nostalgic recollections. We took a toy train from Kalka to Shimla for a panoramic view of the scenic Himalayas. The train rumbled on with puffs of smoke as it snaked the steep hills, brushing past the coniferous greens and the wild roses that grew carelessly on the hill slopes. Such was my first prelude to an everlasting romance: the hills. This towering side of nature mystified me to a great extent. A feeling of immense happiness and calm reverberated in me. It felt like a bizarre dream where a perfect bliss and harmony ruled the world. With a strange awakening, I returned back to my land of sun and palms.

Thereafter I nurtured a hope that someday I shall return to the hills, once again to be awed and mesmerised by their sheer stoicism. But time does play its elusive little tricks! After a vast stretch of ten years Darjeeling happened, the shinning jewel of the North Eastern Himalayas. This experience was more poignant and deep, for this time I devoured the pastoral beauty of hills with an adult eye. The balmy smell of the oaks and the pines, and the fog clad hills rekindled a lost fire. But what actually augmented the trance was the exotic North Eastern culture. I felt far removed from the India of tropics, from the India to which I belonged. This little tourist town with the omnipresence of the hovering Kanchenjunga in the azure sky, the striking patterns of silver jewelery and the mouth watering momos was the perfect escape that one could indulge in to forget a mundane city existence. I fed on every bit of the rustic hilly charm. On the day of leaving I could sense an odd feeling of loss, as if I had left little bits of my soul scattered everywhere, among the pine clusters, in the tea gardens, on the hilltops, and finally amidst the people.

Ever since I was a kid I have always savoured Ruskin Bond's stories which abound in tales of the sleepy Himalayan towns of the pre-independence days. No other writer has been able to capture the grandeur and the simplicity of the hills at the same time like him. After these Himalayan escapades, I would often read these stories with a touch of sentimentality. Months later, after our short and memorable holiday in Darjeeling, I had to fly to Seattle, the emerald city of America. The grief of leaving behind my home and my people had allowed me no time to delve into the topography of this foreign land which was to be my home for sometime. All I could gather from here and there was that it rained nine months of the year there. And with such prepossessions I found myself in Seattle in a late spring afternoon oohing at the blood red rhododendrons and the dark tall pines that thronged the avenues. The nostalgic air of the hills at once hit my senses. There was a countryside charm in the blinding greenery and the soothing clean air. As if God had at last heard me! Redmond, our neighbourhood, might be a prominent dot on the globe for being the Microsoft capital and the home of the great Bill Gates, but to a nature gazer like me the experience of living each day in this sylvan quietude was overwhelming. Visiting the picturesque Mount Rainier (in the picture above) remains the creme de la creme of my Seattle memoirs. Shrouded by pines and maples, it looked like a piece of magic, too surreal to stand on its own on this earth. The innumerable melting glaciers on its slate gray crest resembled locks of dishevelled white hair on an old man's face that has stiffened with age and experience.

And now, my mulling over these greener times on a hot Texan day, makes them grow fainter as if they belong to a long lost world. I have been longing for a bit of the proverbial 'mountain air' for my worries to melt away like the snow on the slopes of Mount Rainier. The haunting words of Rudyard Kipling keep playing in my mind - "The smell of the Himalayas, if it once creeps into the blood of a man, he will return to the hills again and again and will love to live and die among them."